Introduction
David Bowie created an expansive body of work. Spotify’s biography of him starts by noting that “[t]he cliché about David Bowie is that he was a musical chameleon […]” What patterns can we find in his many coloured oeuvre? Does clustering show the Berlin trilogy as an entity separate from the other albums? If so, can we see an influence of recording location in general? Do the albums with producer Tony Visconti form a cluster? I hope to visualise some interesting results.
The corpus consists of the studio albums. Compilations, live albums and rarities will be excluded from the selection. This is to prevent overlap and to focus the results.
The Berlin Trilogy
Black dots are Berlin Trilogy tracks.
Blue dots are tracks off other albums.
Size is speechiness (but how useful is this feature?).
The Berlin Trilogy consists of the albums Low (1977), Heroes (1977), and Lodger (1979). Collaborator Brian Eno’s instrumental ambient influence is apparent. Let’s look at how the trilogy scores at instrumentalness and acousticness in Spotify’s analysis. These plots show acousticness and instrumentalness of the first 17 studio albums by Bowie, from his debut David Bowie (1967) to Never Let Me Down (1987).
The mean instrumentalness of the corpus is 0.0777 and the median is 0.0003.
Where most albums score low on instrumentalness, Heroes and Low exhibit a high degree of instrumentalness. Lodger is somewhat instrumental, but not enough to identify the Berlin Trilogy by instrumentalness alone. But if we combine instrumentalness (at least one track above 0.7) with a wide spread on the acousticness scale, we have a description of what makes the trilogy stand out in this visualization.
“acousticness: A confidence measure from 0.0 to 1.0 of whether the track is acoustic. 1.0 represents high confidence the track is acoustic. The distribution of values for this feature look like this:” [insert picture]
Valence and a trilogy within the Trilogy
Black dots are Berlin Trilogy tracks.
Blue dots are tracks off other albums.
Valence is a measure from 0.0 to 1.0 describing the musical positiveness conveyed by a track. Tracks with high valence sound more positive (e.g. happy, cheerful, euphoric), while tracks with low valence sound more negative (e.g. sad, depressed, angry). [Cited from Spotify.]
The instrumental ‘Weeping Wall’ on the album Low does not sound as sad as one would perhaps expect given the title. The Spotify algorithm estimates its valence at 0.559.
The mean valence of the corpus is 0.557 and the median is 0.551.
The five tracks with lowest valence are all from the Berlin Trilogy albums Low and “Heroes”. ‘Sense of Doubt’ is the track with lowest valence in the corpus (0.0365). The descending four-note motif suggests suspense or even dread and sounds like it was sampled from a thriller or horror film. ‘Sense of Doubt’ is the first of three instrumental tracks on “Heroes”. The three triangles in the top left corner represent this trilogy within the Trilogy. If you connect this trilogy within “Heroes” with lines to get a triangle, ‘Art Decade’ on the album Low falls within this triangle. These low-valence instrumental tracks make these albums stand out from the more traditional pop sound of most Bowie albums. Do these instrumentals constitute the sonic quintessence of the Berlin Trilogy?
Outlier: Sense of Doubt
‘Sense of Doubt’ is the first of three instrumental tracks on “Heroes”. This is the track with lowest valence in the corpus (0.0365).
In the chromagram we see the (filtered) white noise of the first seven seconds. Troughout the instrumental the A is very present.
Timbre
In ‘Sense of Doubt’, the low-register four-note piano riff is juxtaposed with a high pitched synth line. Perhaps this alteration can be seen in the plot, but it is not very clear. The structure is not simple (at the level of musical bars).